For photographs of the LACMA Machine Project, view the slideshow here.
Something weird happened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this weekend. A girl walked 6.4 miles from LACMA to Machine Project
gallery in Echo Park, connecting the two sites with a very long piece
of string. That was just the beginning. You may recall the time Machine
Project buried people alive? Or the time they blasted whale songs from
the radios/CDs of Cadillac Escalades? Setting aside any trepidation,
LACMA invited Machine Project to take over the place on Saturday,
basically to rethink what a museum is for.
“Usually, when we
visit a museum, we treat it like a slumbering organism, with priceless
artifacts held in protoplasmic suspension,” Machine Project founder
Mark Allen writes in the exhibition’s accompanying program. “We stay at
a respectful distance, move at a measured pace, keep our voices down.
Today we’re going to try something different.”
Those of us who
have been going to Allen’s events for years are game — giddy, even, at
the thought of the Machine Project aesthetic infiltrating the
gabillion-dollar enclave of Warhols and Cezannes. Others, like one
older woman in the restroom, are not. The sound of the brass trio
playing in the elevator seeps into her toilet stall. “Why do they have
to play that sound and ruin the effect? Ay yai yai yai yai.”
Why
are the things you most want to see the ones you end up missing? I was
so mesmerized by Karen Lofgren’s eerily glowing unicorn skeleton laid
in state in a loving heap amidst the bamboo beneath the Japanese
Pavilion, I forgot to watch Lasagna Cat do his re-enactment of classic
Garfield comics. I could have strolled for the entire day and still not
found the mysterious, gently breathing animatronic kitten sleeping
within an existing wall vitrine somewhere in the museum.
“Should
we do some centering? I think we need to center ourselves,” says the
girl in the area dubbed The Loneliest Gallery. People toss balloons and
confetti—then vacuum them up. Allen decided that that part of the
museum seemed particularly neglected and ought to be cheered up. “It
needs you,” according to the program. “It needs all of us. Nobody wants
to be lonely.”
That program booklet, by the way, is a keeper. It
says funny things, like “Laura Steenberge. Melancholy Contrabass
Improvisations. Laura will play amongst the Dutch paintings for really
kind of a lot of hours.” A performance in which 60 people try to clap
once per minute for 60 minutes without using a time-keeping device, it
tells us, is scheduled for: “noon-1pm’ish.”
How does Machine
translate to the big stage? A little dispersed, say the Debbie Downers
. Though that can be a plus. Every hour on the hour, a guy atop the
building plays speed metal under a gothic arch modeled on Loiret
France’s Doorway With Arms of the Counts of Chazay (which can be found
on the 3rd floor of the Ahmanson Building). But he’s so far away, you
have to look through a telescope (one has been provided) to see him.
See the red lights? The fog? They give the guitarist a Satanic flair.
“They wouldn’t let us do speed metal in the real arch,” confesses
organizer Michele Yu.
“They,” meaning the museum muckamucks, have imposed restrictions. Please don’t lean on Richard Serra’s Sequence sculpture. Please, no flash photography. Emily Lacy is addressing these
very issues in a performance titled “Please Don’t Touch Anything/ A
Sacred Oratorio for the Precious.” The museum is electric tonight. The
Machine’s critical eye is a playful one, taking itself both seriously
and not, flipping our expectations of museum-going behavior on its head.
After
a musical interlude inside Sequence, I slip into a kind of fruit-in-art
tour of the permanent collection led by Fallen Fruit Collective’s
Matias Viegener. “We were originally going to count up all the kinds of
fruits in the art,” he says, “then make a fruit salad with fruit in
proportion to the amounts in the paintings. That way you could actually
taste the art. But LACMA thought it would be too dirty.”
Some of
the painted grapes, he tells us conspiratorially, are moody, ambivalent
and all about control. And, he adds, “We’re working on a theory that
one of the reasons the art in this wing is so somber and serious is
because there is no fruit in it.”
In one of the Ahmanson
galleries, Holly Vesecky is re-creating with fresh flowers Sam Francis’
abstract painting Toward Disappearance. The scent of narcissus drifts
down the corridor to where the Institute for Figuring’s Margaret and
Christine Wertheim are teaching people how to crochet coral reefs out
of plastic garbage bags.
Like Disneyland, it’s impossible to do,
see, smell, taste or otherwise experience everything. From the kinetic
sculptures and the knitting and soldering workshops to the sleeping
babies in the Nap Area and —like an errant knight — Cory Fogel
wandering around in a suit made of pepper cans to the papier-mâché
replicas of the Hearst antiquities, a pun on Hearst’s penchant for
making copies of his acquisitions. Machine’s one-day takeover of LACMA
is epic. Mark Allen himself, running back and forth between buildings
in hardcore master-of-ceremonies mode, seems part of one big,
collective piece. Even the people in the museum
courtyard–turned–Machine Mission Control rub their eyes
blearily—exhausted, but sated — as evening falls and the Southland
fires smoke the air like a thousand barbecues.